Philosophy

Public trust in model-based science: moving beyond the “view from nowhere”

By Michela Massimi

Never more than during the COVID-19 pandemic, the public has been reminded of the importance of science and the need to trust scientific advice and model-based public health policy. The delicate triangulation among scientific experts, policymakers, and the public, which is so central to fight misinformation and mistrust, has shone a light on a well-entrenched “view from nowhere” that science is often identified with. Why trust experts and their model-based policy anyway?

Institutional distrust in Britain and America: a history

By Brian P. Levack

In the past few decades, trust and distrust have become frequent subjects of journalistic and academic discourse. Distrust of British and American public institutions has, in fact, a much longer and more complex history than most academics recognize.

International Women’s Day: feminist philosophy with Clara Zetkin

By Dalia Nassar and Kristin Gjesdal

Clara Zetkin was instrumental in establishing International Women’s Day. It did not take long to catch on. The following year the International Women’s Day was marked by over a million people taking to the streets.

Why does justice for animals matter?

By Jeff Sebo

Recent health and environmental crises have taught us that our lives are increasingly connected. Many of us now appreciate pursuing health and climate justice requires pursuing social and economic justice too. And in the same kind of way, I believe, pursuing justice for humans requires pursuing justice for animals too.

The VSI podcast season three: ageing, Pakistan, slang, psychopathy, and more

By The VSI podcast team

Listen to season three of The VSI Podcast for concise and original introductions to a selection of our VSI titles from the authors themselves.

Which anti-vaxxers are irrational?

By Alex Worsnip

Consider two different characters: Alanna and Brent. Both refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine, but their motivations are different. Alanna believes that the vaccine is unsafe and ineffective. Brent simply doesn’t care much about protecting others, and so he can’t be bothered to get vaccinated. Are these characters irrational?

Staging philosophy: the relationship between philosophy and drama

By Kristin Gjesdal

Where does philosophy belong? In lecture halls, libraries, and campus offices? In town squares? In public life? One answer to this question, exceedingly popular from the Enlightenment onward, has been that philosophy belongs on stage—not in the sense that this is the only place we should find it, but that the relationship between philosophy and drama is particularly productive and promising.

Majority rule is not democracy

By Paul Woodruff

What is democracy? Pundits have been writing recently that democracy is majority rule, but that is wrong, dangerously wrong.

The morality of espionage: do we have a moral duty to spy?

Why spy? . . . For as long as rogues become leaders, we shall spy. For as long as there are bullies and liars and madmen in the world, we shall spy. For as long as nations compete, and politicians deceive, and tyrants launch conquests, and consumers need resources, and the homeless look for land, and the hungry for food, and the rich for excess, your chosen profession is perfectly secure, I can assure you. (John Le Carré, “The Secret Pilgrim”)

Knowing one’s opinion is worth hearing

By Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb

Mary Midgley muses that the dearth of men in Oxford during WW2 helped her and her friends Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch find their way into philosophy. But each of them took years to find her voice—Midgley longest of all. What held them back and what provoked them to finally speak up?

City spaces, pace bias, and the production of disability

By Quill R Kukla

How does our body shape our experience of living in a city? In this OUPblog, Quill R Kukla focuses on one fascinating dimension along which bodies are included in or excluded from spaces, namely pace.

Fake news, misinformation, and disinformation: journalism today?

By Rebecca Olley

[Reading list] Fake, false, inaccurate, misleading, and deceptive. This rhetoric is all too familiar to the news consuming public today. But what is fake news and how does it differ from misinformation and disinformation?

How can we solve the energy crisis and mitigate climate change?

By Mark Rowlands

Symptoms of the looming climate crisis abound: 50-year extreme heat events happening every year, melting of polar ice sheets, forest fires that encircle the globe, tropical cyclones of greater size, intensity and, as was very evident in Ida’s recent visit to New York, unprecedented levels of precipitation.

The power of words [podcast]

By Steven Filippi and Sarah Butcher

We’re all familiar with the phrase “words have power” but in a political and cultural climate where we become more aware of the power that money, influence, and privilege have every day, how do people wield the power of words?

SHAPE and societal recovery from crises

By SHAPE team

The SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy) initiative advocates for the value of the social sciences, humanities, and arts subject areas in helping us to understand the world in which we live and find solutions to global issues. As societies around the world respond to the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, research from SHAPE disciplines has the potential to illuminate how societies process and recover from various social crises.

Have humans always lived in a “pluriverse” of worlds?

By Greg Anderson

In the modern West, we take it for granted that reality is an objectively knowable material world. From a young age, we are taught to visualize it as a vast abstract space full of free-standing objects that all obey timeless universal laws of science and nature. But a very different picture of reality is now emerging from new currents of thought in fields like history, anthropology, and sociology.